ENRC’s general counsel, Randal Barker, submitted his resignation less than one week after four board members left the company. Two of them were well respected and independent board members Richard Sykes and Kenneth Olisa. Both were ousted by a majority of shareholders.

Mr. Sykes, ENRC’s former senior independent board member and former chairman of GlaxoSmithKline, lashed out against the company’s top three founding shareholders.

“These guys are mad,” Mr. Sykes told the Daily Mail. ‘This is a public company that’s run by private people. It’s more than bloody peculiar, it’s run by oligarchs. As soon as you get the opportunity to sell your shares I’d sell them,” he said.

ENRC is a FTSE-100 company whose three main shareholders, Alexander Mashkevitch, Alijan Ibragimov and Patokh Chodiev, control 44% of the company’s shares and exercise significant influence over the board. The company listed its shares in 2007 and has a free float of about 18.6%, meaning that the interests of minority shareholders could be overshadowed by the interests of larger shareholders.

“ENRC’s core shareholders–the “Eurasian Trio”–will continue to exercise full control over the company’s operations and, surely, sometimes this could work against minority shareholders, like the case with ENRC’s M&A,” Troika Dialog said in a note.